Sharing information and reporting on all that reeks in American education, especially corporate reform in K12 education, the agenda to privatize the right to a free public education for every child, and general corruption in K12-higher education. Calling out and exposing rather than cowering.

AND eager for your help. Have a story of power, manipulation, self-interest or injustice which needs attention? Let me know and we'll let the world discover "what's that smell."

"If you're a profession of sheep, then you'll be run by wolves." -- David C. Berliner

"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: Everything else is public relations." -- George Orwell

"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral." -- Paulo Freire

*A slideshow of Ed Reform-Critical Boxer's "Greatest Hits" memes runs at the bottom of this page.*

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT! ;)

Thursday, August 27, 2015

Part 8; Chapter 3: “The American Dream: Myths and Realities”
– Explaining the Specters of Poverty

"The fundamental
social significance of the neurobiological discoveries that I’ve just
summarized is that healthy brain development in American children turns out to
be closely correlated with parental education, income, and social class"

So begins the second half of Robert Putnam’s “Parenting” chapter
from Our Kids: The American Dream in
Crisis. Having shared *in earlier pages* the Adverse Childhood Experience
scale and introduced the John Henry Effect, wherein even those who seemed to
escape poverty and other stresses still deal with “adverse physiological
effects” due to the “wear and tear of chronic stress” (113), Putnam piles on
more evidence that the trace of poverty is at least as difficult to escape as
poverty itself.

Kids in poverty “are at greater risk for elevated levels of
cortisol,” a stress hormone that “impinges” health; emotional regulation in the
brain is influenced by stress; and, some research suggests that the reason poor
kids seem to have more trouble concentrating on a single task is because they
are struck in a sort of constant fight or flight reflex: “Their brains had been
trained to maintain constant surveillance of the environment for new threats”
(116).

Imagine being a poor student in the current age of
corporacratic education reform, with new threats of high-stakes standardized
tests, stressed-out teachers, and the constant peril of school closures! Those
of us parenting and teaching in the era of education reform need to pay close
attention to what Putnam and his colleagues’ research tells us about poverty,
stress, and growing socioeconomic gaps.

Simply put, “kids from more affluent homes are exposed to
less toxic stress than kids raised in poverty” (117), and while day-to-day
interactions among kids from different economic strata are rarer than they used
to be, do parents really want to accept a “I’ll take care of mine; you take
care of yours” approach? If we are in an age of self-interest=best-interest
parenting within the affluent classes, is such an approach truly in the best
interests of even wealthy kids? If the answer is “yes” – and it very well may
be – aren’t poor families and poor children simply out of luck?

Perhaps knowledge of the “class-based gap in parenting
styles, which has been growing significantly during recent decades,” could
offer some hope (117) – if less-affluent parents were able to take on traits of
more affluent parents, a big if given the realities of current resource
stratifications.

Putnam dismisses notions that child-rearing between classes
is cultural. Brain science, he says, indicates that poor parents are more harsh
and punitive in their styles “because they themselves experienced higher levels
of chronic stress” (121). Today’s poor kids are more likely than they have been
in a long time to be poor parents despite their efforts. By the time they are
parents, imagine the stress that comes from a system that seems designed to
keep one where one is rather than offers mobility for effort. Even parents who
try valiantly to embed or embody Concerted Cultivated aspects may have to live
with the knowledge that the specter of poverty is too great a haunt to
overcome. With such knowledge, though, where is hope? Without the knowledge?
Imagine a young driver learning a clutch transmission system. The one fortunate
enough to have access to the car grinds the gears. The car’s gears grind, but
it goes nowhere. If the privileged party doesn’t do something to change his or
her operating procedures, the car will grind its gears unwittingly until the
stress of the frictions wear it down and it becomes broken, sometimes beyond
repair, and not completely because of its own actions.

Is being poor in America like being a manual transmission? You move or grind to a haltat the whim of the driver, but still take the blame if they wear you out?

Regarding family dinners, we know that conversing around
food offers a means of communal rapport humans have known and valued for
thousands of years. However, poor parents often cannot “make eating together a
priority” (123) even if they wanted to. While admitting eating together is “no
panacea for child development,” Putnam asserts that “it is one indicator of the
subtle but powerful investments that parents make in their kids (or fail to
make)” (123).

“Stressed parents are both harsher and less attentive
parents,” says Putnam (130), but we must realize that very few parents actually
seek to be harsh and inattentive. Whereas affluent parents have resources,
poor, stressed parents live with scarcity. Via a book by that name,
Mullainathan and Shafir influence Putnam’s understandings:

Under conditions of scarcity, they
write, the brain’s ability to grasp, manage, and solve problems falters, like a
computer slowed down by too many open apps, leaving us less efficient and less
effective than we would be under conditions of abundance (130).

Those not as familiar with scarcity (or computers) might better
understand the world poor parents inhabit via thinking about sleep. Or, the
lack of it, actually. Any adult professional will tell you that even if they
work long hours, there comes a time when their body and mind is just worn down
by the grind of being too active for too long to try to meet a goal. Even
affluent parents should admit to not making the best parenting decisions when
they are sleep-deprived. In no unrealistic manner, less-affluent parents live
their lives in a metaphorical state of sleep deprivation, able to perform
better if only they could meet their own needs and rest easy.

But, as Putnam’s
amalgamation of the research shows, since families are less able to get out of
the cycles of poverty than in decades past, they never get that rest. They may
have been on high alert as kids, remained on high alert as adults, and are on
high alert while raising kids who are on high alert too.

Not only do specters of poverty remain, but
they compound and form boggish quagmires. Acting more like affluent parents without the resources is not be enough to resolve mobility issues. Indeed, the inverse is more likely: Solving mobility issues is likely to help less-affluent parents act more like those use the Concerted Cultivation style of parenting.

Indeed, worth noting is that favoring the habits of college-educated (remember: this is the criteria Putnam uses to describe affluent families) parents and their "results" -- the behaviors and dispositions of their children -- may only be seen as healthy or the preferred model because the power of opinion is in the hands of the wealthy. Given that so few affluent American kids interact with poor kids now compared to the 1950s, when social mobility was high within and among classes, perhaps affluent parents are producing hyper-coddled, egotists with no internal coping mechanisms once they see they're not as perfect as they might have thought. Many of us know of one or two kids from well-educated families who are over-confident assholes in no small part due to their parents' particular blend of Concerted Cultivation or meshing of the worst iterations of the two styles.

I think of some (certainly not all) of my students at Washington State University, who seemed to have left the country club of high school social life for the resort and spa of WSU. While they were eager to call foul regarding many social ills and inequity, rarely were they able to articulate their own economic privilege, except through conspicuous consumerism. Even among those who were first-generation college students or who identified as from working-class families, many admitted to me that the campus seemed to support a social pressure toward entitled that seemed to emanate from those who were economically privileged and did not have the worry of paying their own tuition bills. I remember how uncomfortable I felt on the beautiful grounds of the University of Virginia, earning my doctorate as a North Carolinian with roots in poverty but now walking among the popped collars and BMW's of nineteen-year-olds eager to get to some horse race or show off their latest dress shirt and bow tie. I think of a professoriate at large also willing to point out many inequities and inequalities but less willing to acknowledge that most of its members are from the upper-middle class, so economic value system may perpetuate in colleges. I think of helicopter parents' children who are so afraid of letting go of their support systems and bolstering resources that they have trouble with independence. I consider the push from some college kids for the coddling of required trigger warning policies and how some resist the notion of college as a place where their ideas and preconceived notions should be challenged.

But I digress...

Regardless of my extrapolations, important questions remain: If rich kids only see and interact with other rich kids, how can their mindsets be challenged? Does class segregation yield parenting with self-perpetuating pampering which reifies paupering? Surely some American kids are living the dream; others seem stuck in a dream state in which neither rest, sleep, nor comfort are afforded them, certainly not offered to them by the dominant discoursers of affluent dreamers either obtuse or unsympathetic to their realities.

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

I find it interesting to note how both ed reformers and resisters are appropriating the most-recent iteration of the "teacher shortage" phenomenon. Ed reformers use it to suggest TFA solutions, nix certification requirements, and usher in a cheap and compliant labor force. Resistors say ed policy has become so toxic, people just don't want to be teachers anymore. They point to certain cities and dropping numbers in teacher ed programs and "teacher flight."

The truth is somewhere in the middle, but there are truths both sides are ignoring as well. For example, in citing Albuquerque's teacher shortage, no one has reported that other local districts have laid off good teachers due to budgets but that Albuquerque may not have hired those experienced teachers even though they live nearby. I only know about it due to having a former student teaching in the area.

Another reality that ed professors, school administrators, resistors and reformers do not want to acknowledge due to nuance is that there may be many applicants for positions in certain areas claiming a teacher shortage, but the admins in those districts don't want to hire people who they see as problematic to the ed reform agenda. To my mind, this would be anyone who is a graduate from a teacher ed program worth its salt.

So, while some districts might experience a genuine teacher shortage -- and might have done so for years in certain content areas -- others are most likely experiencing a self-induced hiring shortage instead to help their overlords reward the types of people who will serve them best in teaching positions while they turn away well-trained, educated, even experienced and licensed applicants.

Monday, August 24, 2015

As I annotated my copy of Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, I thought about many of its findings and precents related to constructs of white privilege and white superiority. Two specific ideas for new(?) terms formulated, or swirled roughly in and out of tangibility, as I read. Given the economic opportunity gaps between the poor and the rich -- within and across races -- why aren't more academics and activists focusing on a poverty-first or socioeconomic equity-first social justice agenda that encapsulates race and gender rather than focus specifically on race? Even in the weeks since I completed my reading, there is evidence of these "race vs class" tensions in policy problem-solving and analyzing current events. The BlackLivesMatter movement has helped Bernie Sanders reframe his talk on financial reform as one in which economic and race issues run as parallels, for example. This new position could constitute kowtowing, given Sanders seems to know that many race issues are rooted in economics first. But why do Americans have so much trouble acknowledging that virtually all oppression in American society, certainly in contemporary American capitalism, is economic-based, from slavery to assimilation to manifest destiny to anti-desegregation, anti-suffrage, and anti-gay marriage efforts?I offer two terms from my inchoate-made-almost-palpable to help explain it. The terms reside below white superiority, or, since I *do* see issues as economics-based first, just Superiority, and are possible subsets of white privilege. Please offer me feedback if other authors have already named these constructs. They're more formulating than formulaic right now, as I continue to learn and grow my own social justice agenda rooted in mobility inequality.

1. "White Status" -- a construct residing between white supremacy and white privilege, but in a spectral, trickster sense. White status can be observed living in language via phrases like "That's mighty white of you" and "Thank God I'm white!" even when used ironically or to draw attention to white privilege. Most acutely, white status is the sense of class and race superiority that poor, working-, and lower-middle class whites might have which keeps them separate from, "above" or more fortunate than (in their own minds) POC. White status is a specter, a folly of a false ghost, because for the majority of those who might claim it, it offers negligible benefits at best and actually reinforces wedges between groups of people who have much in common regarding socioeconomic inequities, thereby serving white supremacy/socioeconomic stratification by ensuring that POC and poorer whites do no work together as much or as well as they could to bring about economic revolution. So, white status may appear to be a blessing to poor whites, but it actually serves the Economic Masters.

2. "White Skew" -- whereas white status might be a construct most apparent among poorer whites, White Skew may be more apparent among POC and especially prevalent among well-off whites. White skew is the notion that because of white supremacy or white privilege,or, worse, because of whiteness itself, white people can't really be poor. Intensified by growing socioeconomic segregation in housing, schooling and other cultural and social constructs, white skew is racism when coming from POC but also reveals a hidden racism toward POC from well-off whites. Whiteness equates to privilege, to access to success. So, if a white person is poor, it must be *their* fault and their fault alone because whites can't be poor because they are white. Regarding segregation, white skew might reveal itself when whites of a certain socioeconomic class assume they are the baseline for all of the white experience and simply do not believe that there are white under-classes or white people who struggle with poverty. Regarding racism toward POC, inherent in white skew mindset is that only POC can be poor, so white skew is part of the very worst ways in which white supremacy can be defined. Ironically, white skew might be found most among whites who identify as liberal and be so embedded that it only rears its head when said liberals actualize race-based activist efforts at the expense of all-inclusive socioeconomic equity activism, working for the lesser races who because of their lesser races (usually brown races or ethnicities) can't help themselves.

So, am I on to something? Do analogues of these constructs already exist in critical race theory, social justice theories, etc.?

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Putnam begins “Parenting,” the third chapter of Our Kids, with eighteen pages devoted to
profiling African American families from different socioeconomic strata in
Atlanta, Georgia. He chooses Atlanta because it has the “largest, most rapidly
growing gap between rich and poor of any American city” (81). He admits the gap
deserves studying along racial lines, but notes “within the black community
itself, class and income differences have also grown” (81), and the black
community as a whole is becoming “increasingly polarized along economic lines”
(82). Combined racial and economic
segregation means that in Atlanta, as in many American cities and towns, “the
black upper class and middle class…are increasingly separated from their white
counterparts and from poor blacks” (82).
While Putnam never treats racial segregation and subjugation with disbelief,
he works to reveal that “class disparities within each race” and across races
re important to acknowledge as well (83).

The different affordances of wealth regarding parenting
spring from this racially-charged backdrop, though, and the chapter’s conversation
gets more disconcerting as it develops. Explaining serve-and-return cognition,
a construct in which a preverbal child sends forth a signal and learns or gains
impressions via adult response, Putnam reaffirms what many early childhood
experts and educators have known for years: “Cognitive stimulation by parents
is essential for optimal learning” (110). What contingent construct makes a
difference in cognitive stimulation? Stress. Or the type and amount of stresses
parents face and to which kids are subjected, anyway.

As one might figure, homes in which parents are struggling
to get ahead are homes in which levels of “toxic stress” may be elevated. Toxic
stress may “impede successful development” of children and can include physical
abuse and neglect, the failure to send any
signal to a young serve-and-returner. This kind of toxicity, perhaps the result
of worn-out parents who cannot move forward despite their efforts, might be
worse than physical mistreatment (111). Deficits from neglect impair brain
development, says Putnam, and are difficult to repair (112).

So many adverse childhood experiences can affect the neural
pathways and emotional development of children that scientists have created a
scale in their name (though Putnam doesn’t distinguish what kinds of
scientists, presenting a rare moment of the sophomoric): The Adverse Childhood
Experiences Scale lists ten realities which correlate with some form of
damaging stress.

From page 113. And to think: Some think rigor is the most important thing teacherscan provide for their poor students and students dealing with major stresses.

Even for resilient children – those who seem to thrive
regardless of the many stresses in their lives – the “wear and tear of chronic
stress” may create situations in which they are “living on borrowed time”
(113). Putnam explains that even for resilient kids, the “John Henry effect” is
hard to escape. That is to say even if kids seem to do well in escaping poverty
and hardship early on, research suggests it is only a matter of time until the
piling on, the cumulative affect catches up to them and negatively influences
their lives.

Except that it caught up to you, John. That ended badly for you.

If such children run forward early on, the monsters chasing them
eventually overtake them, and they too become rhizomed into the cycle of moving
backwards even as they attempt to move ahead. The specters of poverty may be
more difficult to escape than poverty itself, and once the ghosts have caught
up, the hopeful striver may not be able to stave off the haunting any longer
and tumble back into that from which he or she strove toward liberation. Toxic
stresses linger like absent presences, part of one’s history eager to make
themselves known. And lived. Now.

As someone who experienced several stresses on the scale as
a kid and who has found himself dealing with career and familial burn-out, having
reached a nadir of trying to balance financial, family, and especially toxic
working conditions in my field and in the English departments at UTEP and
Washington State University, Pullman, (and at the University of Southern
Mississippi before that), Putnam’s chapter speaks to me. As I look back on all
the accomplishments for my family and myself I’d hoped for versus the resources
– fiscal, physical, mental, political, emotional; support systems and fallbacks
– I had or didn’t have to actualize them, I
think it is little wonder I have felt and still feel spent.

At twelve and sixteen and eighteen and twenty-four and
twenty-eight, I was one of those resilient

Do mobility studies and rhizome theory intersect? When it comes
to improving one's socioeconomic status, escaping one's roots
is more difficult than many Americans want to acknowledge.

kids, even with a set of adults
cheering him on. By thirty-eight, with two kids of my own and a working-class
penchant for speaking my mind against ignorance and injustice (especially as
perpetrated by the educated “intelligent”) and an intolerance for bullshit, academia’s
upper-middle class ethos seemed strange, hard to navigate, at loggerheads with
my strong values, and certainly less like a meritocracy than my
bootstrap-believing mind had ever thought it was.

Adding on a K12 and higher
education system steeped in neoliberal values, policy-making, and counterintuities
regarding helping kids and producing valued work, and interlacing them with the
peculiar “gold” that is departmental dysfunction, I reflect and wonder why I’m
still standing. Given the financial stresses in place as we struggled (and
struggle) with student loans (Yes, I was on fellowship at UVa, but…), preschool
costs, medical bills, and basic costs-of-living as a family with two parents
from poverty (though more so for me than for my wife) still running from their
own specters and that all of this was happening in what should have been my
formative tenure-“earning” (academia is no meritocracy, though surviving its bureaucracy
entails pretending like it is. Hence my quotation marks) years, perhaps I
should be surprised I lasted as long as I did in academia.

And, let’s face it:
By the time one nears his or her 40s, the cheering crowds of supporters eager
to see a young person like me make good dwindle away with the addition of years
which themselves strip one from title of “young person.”

Surely there are those
who experienced worse than I did growing up and who have earned tenure and have
happy, content lives. I think of them and remind myself that part of the
problem with having Americans acknowledge mobility inequality is American’s penchant
for letting exceptions act as the rules.

"Check your economic privilege, Scrooge!"/"I'll not take that from someoneliterally as white as a ghost, Marley!"

As a father, the chapter makes me more cognizant of my
failings or potential failings as well.
Those who are considering divorce, have a tendency to yell, and are still
battling the ghosts of the past in the present are not offered much hope beyond
Jacob Marley-like, forewarning knowledge, however. Marley helped transform Scrooge
into a more sympathetic person, though, right?

With that tinge of hope in mind, I continue my reflections
on “Parenting” soon.

As well, scroll below this entry to read the first of two segments on Putnam's "Families" chapter. I see Our Kids as central to understanding contemporary exigencies regarding education policy and essential to building and actualizing an egalitarian social justice agenda. I see and hope to reveal connections to education and schooling, education reform, and my own experiences.

As if aware of possible imbroglio regarding traditionalist
and sexist undercurrents in the first two-thirds of the “Families” chapter of Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis,
author Robert Putnam offers an admission of the perplexing connections among
poverty and women’s health issues. “Whatever the reasons,” he says as if doing so
might offer a tabula rasa, “children of less-educated parents are increasingly entering
the world as an unplanned surprise…while children of more educated parents are
increasingly entering the world as a long-planned objective” (65). This
difference, Putnam feels, affects the resources a parent or parents have to
raise those kids.

Regarding non-marital births, Putnam informs that numbers
remain low for college-educated women and that “the racial gap within classes
has narrowed, while the gap within races has widened,” echoing overall trends
in American economic mobility. Putnam also explicates issues of cohabitation,
divorce, and multi-partner fertility, which is a term to describe “blended
families” (68).

Apparently, less-educated families are more likely to have
elements of the “impermanent structure” of multi-partner fertility. My own
childhood can act as an example of what this means. From the time I was nine
until I was nineteen, I saw my mother marry twice after divorcing my
birth-father. I saw my father marry three more times. Along the way, I picked
up and kept two half-brothers and a step-sister on my mother’s side. I caught
and released, so to speak, three step-brothers from one step-mother and have
retained two step-sisters and a step-brother from my dad’s current marriage. I “lost”
a step-dad and two-step mothers along the way, though I hardly regard them as
losses.

Among siblings with the same mother, I count a set of twin boys with
whom I share a father, one half-brother half my age whose dad was my second
step-father, and a half-brother whose dad is my current step-father and who is
two decades my junior. Our family rule is to count half-brothers as brothers,
but given we were close to grown when the latest “steps” entered our parents’
lives, we tend to see them and their children as relatives but not necessarily
brothers and sisters. In between the courtships that lead to marriages were
itinerant partners, flings, cohabitators, false starts and mistakes. As the
oldest child, I am witness to them all and often had to intervene in some way
for some manner (I know that’s vague, but even I deserve my secrets). One can
imagine the uncertainty and instability surrounding my our childhoods. Male figures in particular,
given our mother had custody of us, were ephemeral presences and not always
good role models.

In this regard, I lived like many kids, “especially from
less affluent, less educated backgrounds” in that my father

Family matters when it comes to upward mobility.

wasn’t always
around (69). He was somewhere, though, and often telephoned if he was not
nearby. Putnam informs that many men who have children with whom they do not
live have “no contact with their children” (69).

All the changes to the family structure have resulted in a “class-biased
decline in the number of children raised in two-parent families” (69). Notice
within this quotation Putnam does not define “two-parent” to signify
heteronormativity, per se. However, he later states that “College educated moms
are also more likely to have a male breadwinner in the household” (71), even if
they work too, and this results in “a substantial class disparity in the
financial resource available for childrearing” (71). Readers will have to draw
their own conclusions about whether Putnam’s research and explanations skew
toward a prickly conservativism, but he admits to a messiness considering
family factors’ impact on poverty and mobility:

[C]ause and effect are entangled here: poverty produces
family instability, and family instability in turn produces poverty. A similar
kind of mutual reinforcement occurs between affluence and stability (75).

Moving from cultural shifts as explicatives for “family
breakdown” to policy shifts, Putnam says three “probably” contributed (76): The
War on Drugs, 3-strike legal proceedings, and increased incarceration. Having
just heard Bernie Sanders reveal *his plan* for racial justice and equity, I can’t
help thinking about these three factors and how they have affected the lives of
people of color and poor Americans of every color.

The “two-tiered family pattern” (77; also see my previous blog post on "Families") has consequences for
children. Affluent kids tend to live in two-parent homes and have access to the
resources two incomes affords. In the lowest third of poor American families,
most kids live with only one parent or in the “kaleidoscopic” realities I
mentioned in part 1 of this chapter’s reflection and in this installment’s
paragraphs detailing my own upbringing. Even within the kaleidoscopic mode, the
dominant theme is that only one person has an income (76-78).

Divorce and absent birth-fathers take their tolls on
children. Regardless of race,

Children who grow up without their biological fathers perform
worse on standardized test, earn lower grades, and stay in school for fewer
years....They are more likely to demonstrate behavioral problems such as
shyness, aggression, and psychological problems such as increased anxiety and
depression (78).

So does stability.

Again, problematics are apparent. Many education experts
know better than to rely on standardized test scores as meaningful metrics of
anything more than poverty and/or parents’ income or educational background.
Standardized test scores may reveal more about zip codes, given increased
segregation among class lines, than they do about intelligence or ability.
Further, neither a proclivity toward shyness nor an assertive nature need
labeling as problematic except in extreme examples.

Of all the body chapters in Our Kids, “Families” reads as
the one with the writerly voice most different from the others. Putnam reveals
his book is influenced and informed by a team of researchers. While the book
lists him as the single author, I hear someone else’s imprint in this chapter’s
tone and penchant for entering a quagmire while trying to top-toe in and out of
damning quicksand. To be sure, liberal, vociferous social justice warriors may
struggle to remain objective in reviewing this chapter’s timbre. Throughout, though,
the veteran scholar’s voice remerges to soften claims with qualifiers, as in
this summary from the penultimate paragraph:

Since family fragmentation is, as we have seen, powerfully
fostered by economic hardship, in one important sense family structure can be seen
as merely an intervening variable between poverty in one generation and poverty
in the next. Nevertheless, it is a prominent part of the picture (79).

While definitions of family evolve and the importance of a “birth-mother-and-birth-father-centric”/neo-traditional
model of the two-parent home faces multiple critiques and interpretations, one
thing is clear: When it comes to poverty, affluence, and economic mobility,
family matters. When family is defined with
stability, it encompasses better affordances for children than when it is not.
Regardless of whether or not Putnam and/or other speakers in this chapter are justified
targets for critique for cis-centric, heteronormative, traditionalist
definitions of family and marriage/healthy pairings, smart readers can, at
least, agree on that.

I see Our Kids as central to understanding contemporary exigencies regarding education policy and essential to building and actualizing an egalitarian social justice agenda. I see and hope to reveal connections to education and schooling, education reform, and my own experiences.

“Families,” the second chapter of Robert Putnam’s Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis,
unfolds via the formula established in chapter one: People and families from
the same area are profiled and extrapolations to national trends are made based
on what the case studies reveal at the local and national levels. Putnam leaves
Ohio to focus on Bend, Oregon, in the early going. Bend experienced rapid growth,
especially between 1970 and 2000, and segregation in Bend “is mostly economic,
not racial” (47) as Putnam says it is in many other cities. In the east of
Bend, child poverty rates are ten times what they are to the west. Bend’s
disparities appear to be the results of the housing bubble. Putnam transitions
from the city’s history to talk about the current “life chances” afforded Bend’s
children and the structures of many of its families (49). “Family differences,”
he says, “produce very different starting points for rich and poor kids” (49)
in Bend and nationwide.

Putnam extols the stability of 1950s American marriage and life,but they were not without their problems.

Indeed, a major point in this chapter is that “poverty
produces family instability, and family instability produces poverty” (74).
Likewise, affluence and family stability appear to correlate. Putnam sets the
framework for an important discussion on the role that stress plays in keeping
poor Americans moving backwards even as they strive to move toward greater
social mobility and economic opportunity, but that component comes to a head in
later chapters. Nonetheless, the undercurrent’s import merits attention.

In further discussion of the history of changing family dynamics,
which have “restricted along class lines over the last half century” (61), Putnam
comes dangerously close to suggesting a politically conservative ethic that
could distance him from liberal or progressive readers. He notes the 1970s as a time when “family
structure suddenly collapsed” (62) and informs that this was when the Baby
Boomers were coming of age. Among the factors challenging previous family
dynamics are a delinking of sex and marriage, the feminist revolution, women
entering the workforce, and increased attention on the individual and “self-fulfillment”
at the expense of community (62). While scholars are of multiple minds about
the exact causes of the transformation, an “unexpected outcome” has been the
emergence of familial trends along class lines. Putnam calls this a “two-tier” (63-64)
structural pattern:

1.Neo-traditional Pattern:

a.Generally the college-educated “upper-third of American
Society”

b.Both partners work outside the home

c.Marriage and childbearing is delayed until
careers are started

d.Domestic duties are more-evenly shared than in
the 50s.

e.Divorce rates have fallen and stabilized since
the 70s

2.Kaleidoscopic Pattern/”Fragile Families” Pattern

a.Generally the high-school-educated “lower third
of the population”

b.Less likely to have two-parent households

c.Two-parent households often include
step-relatives

d.Childbearing and marriage disconnected; children
may be born before or without partners marrying.

e.Sexual partnerships less durable

f.Marriages less durable; divorce rates rising

One might easily consider these lists and wonder about
access to contraceptives and cultural value systems regarding their use. “Delayed
parenting helps kids because older parents are generally better equipped to
support their kids, both materially and emotionally” (64), says Putnam. Early
sexual activity may be the brew in which future family poverty stews.
Non-college educated women are sexually active earlier than their
college-educated peers but do not seek to have more kids than those peers; they
are less likely to use birth control and to have abortions and have more unintended
pregnancies.

Could a class-centric approach to sex education revolutionize how it is taught? Likewise, can a sex education approach to examining social class and economic inequity afford a means of examining pertinent topics with American teens?

In the same way that one might read this chapter as a wholesale endorsement
of 1950s American family life – not without its own problematic patterns and narrow-mindedness
– one might read part of this chapter as placing the blame for class divisions
on women. Neither assumption reflects an accurate representation of Putnam’s
goals, but those who are invested in nontraditional notions of partnership and
marriage and those who advocate for women’s rights may work to trust in that
fact throughout this chapter.

What I see, however, is the need to have conversations in
the secondary classroom on the facts and conjectured facts this chapter offers,
perhaps as part of sex education, perhaps as part of current events or American
History.

As a lifelong educator reading about the confusion among
researchers regarding what to make of the breakdown of family structures and
all the emphasis/potential responsibilities placed on girls and/or elements
within young women’s control if they are empowered enough to note these trends
and possible causes, I can’t help but think that part of the problem in not
changing these inequities is that schools do not talk about these issues enough
(or at all) , and abstinence-only programs in schools seem all the more blind
to realities – and worse, instruments that reify the class patterns.

I admit it seems unfair to women to draw conclusions that
put so much of a burden on their shoulders, but it is true that childbirth is a
universal burden particular to women’s lives and bodies, so perhaps this is a
logical weighting. As the father of young sons – and as someone who entered the
word as the son of a teenage mother and father – I know boys need to hear these
facts and be cognizant of all the ramifications of how they treat young women
and can influence their bodies and lives.

While educators and teacher educators work admirably to
craft conversations about race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality into K12
classrooms, they often struggle about how to talk about class and socioeconomic
divisions. Teachers know how to make classes multicultural spaces regarding
color and gender and have learned how to have conversations in which a person
with certain demographic traits is not seen as representing all people with
those similar traits.

One's economic class is a cultural element of one's life too, but are Americans
too afraid or ashamed to talk about poverty and socioeconomic diversities and inequalities
in K12, higher education, and teacher education settings? Are we better equipped to talk about
race, gender, ethnicity and sexuality than we are to talk about upward mobility and economic equity?
Of course, all these issues are inter-related.

Teachers are less educated and less comfortable
discussing realities of poverty, especially in the face of actual poor students.
Such is the stigma associated with being poor in American society and the
schools which represent and recreate it. It’s hard to know how or where to
start.

My advice to teachers is this: “Families” and the information
within it offer excellent points of entry into discussions on poverty, family,
class, and burdens of responsibility among young people and society. Find ways
to integrate this chapter into your curriculum. This chapter represents a great
place to start.

Thursday, August 6, 2015

Below is the last installment of my series of reflections on the first chapter of Robert Putnam's 2015 release Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. I hope to offer commentary on the remaining chapters as well and invite you to read my previous three installments. I see this book as central to understanding contemporary exigencies regarding education policy and essential to building and actualizing an egalitarian social justice agenda. I see and hope to reveal connections to education and schooling, education reform, and my own experiences.

Part 4; Chapter One: “The American Dream: Myths and Realities”
– A Conceptual Note to Ruin It All?

In the latter pages of the first chapter of Harvard public
policy professor Robert Putnam’s Our
Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, the author defines his research terms
and discusses his methods. Two worrisome facets emerge which could be enough to
turn some readers away or to call his work into question.

Putnam mentions that many who study socioeconomic mobility use a “lagging
indicator” (43) approach in

which they compare children’s income and education
to those of their parents when all parties are or were in their 30s or 40s. I
worried Putnam used a similar method. The result would be that we couldn’t
really know what “now” looks like for several decades. So, Putnam’s work would
feel dubious and conjectural. I was vexed critics and the reading public would
look at his work in such a way that it might actually increase a sense of “inequity
disbelief” among powered, like-classed cross-sections of the population.

Luckily, Putnam does not use the lagging indicator model of
research, instead “examining directly what has been happening to kids the past
three decades – the family into which they’ve been born, the parenting and
schooling they’ve received, the communities in which they’ve been raised” (44).
He does, however, use an indicator of social mobility that might be seen as
flawed as researchers apply their lagging indicator- or “rearview mirror”- (44) approach to Our Kids in the coming years.

Generally, when Putnam speaks of class breakdowns, he uses
education alone as a delineator, or, sometimes, a composite model based on
income, education and occupation (44). The latter is more appropriate, as
education does not automatically signify higher salaries and thereby more
economic mobility. One need have only a baseline awareness of the
adjunctification of the professoriate to know this. Unfortunately, he appears
to rely more on the former:

So when I speak of kids from “upper-class” homes, I simply
mean that at least one of their parents (usually both) graduated from college,
and when I speak of kids from “lower-class” homes, I simply mean that neither
of their parents went beyond high school (45).

He explains that in the book, “poor” equates to those who
are high-school-educated (or have less than high school educations, one presumes);
“college-educated” and “rich” refer to those with college degrees.

I have apprehension that these criteria aren’t accurate
enough for 2015 realities. I find It odd that, given his position as an Ivy
League professor, Putnam fails to consider his set terms as flawed, especially
given the plight of many doctorate-wielding individuals scraping and clawing to
put enough adjunct work together each semester to make a decent but many-times
still poverty-level wage. Certainly outliers exist to suggest Putnam uses a faulty
system. Perhaps too few outliers exist to make a difference statistically
(which would fit a denotative definition of “outlier”); perhaps Putnam makes a
mistake via his defining terminology.

If further analysis of the issues he raises reveals that –
as I am experiencing and as I have a hunch a significant amount of others are
experiencing, especially those with terminal academic degrees – he has
overlooked the poor who (though I hate this term) “over-achieved” to get to
college only to remain poor or return to poverty upon graduation or later in
life, I fear the entirety of Our Kids
can be called into question in ways that might undo the good I assume Putnam
wants to enact via writing on the subjects. Ironically, the model of research he
disfavors, one using lagging indicators, might be what helps cement the book’s
validity or seriously challenges its credibility.

I admit a sensitivity to this possible methodological blemish.
Three years ago I was was earning approximately $66,000 annually (base salary
plus summer teaching) in a tenure-track position in the English Department at
the University of Texas at El Paso. When
five years of dirty politics, shaky leadership (I worked under three department
chairs in those five years) and departmental backbiting at UTEP became untenable
to my mental health and the health of my family, and I felt I might be denied a
fair tenure process after publicly calling into question the methods my
colleagues took in ousting the second chair under whom I worked and abstaining
from the final vote to expel him, I took a significant pay cut by moving
cross-country to Washington State University – Pullman. My position in WSU’s
English department was a visiting assistant professorship with a salary in the
$40Ks. I hoped to reinvigorate my career and outlook, only to find a new breed
of toxicity and mismanagement at my new employer.

Now, having left two academic positions -- albeit obviously noxious
ones – in two years (not to mention that WSU fired me when me cleaning out my
office and informing the departmental secretary I’d done so and where she could
find my office keys, after having completed all duties assigned to me, was not
considered a formal enough resignation notice!) of my own accord blends with my
public criticism of the current education reform movements, Common Core State
Standards, Teach for America, Value-Added Models of teacher evaluation, do-nothing
professional organizations, excessive and harmful standardized testing, and
colleagues taking the “C.Y.O.A.” approach to dealing with these things that they
know are detrimental to children and students to make a perfect storm of
unhirability (or so it seems) in my field of preparation (teaching/teacher
education).

I am a first-generation college student who rose from
divorced parents, neither of whom completed high school, to not only complete
college but to earn a doctorate from a Public Ivy and earn a tenure-track
position at a university ranked in the top echelon of Washington Monthly’s college rankings. But I am also a person
who had to look at the life he had at that institution and the one that came
after it and let it go, once again in hopes of more stable, positive environs.
Having spent a year on the job market and getting only a nibble or two at K12
positions and university positions, I have to wonder if that quotation
attributed to Voltaire isn’t spot-on: “To determine the true rulers of any
society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it that I am not
permitted to criticize?”

By Putnam’s definitions, I came from a background of
poverty. By his definitions, I was poor, but I am no longer poor and will never
be again because I am educated. Educated, indeed. Putnam makes no room for the
Icarus crowd in Our Kids. Further,
academic neoliberalism embraces concepts of white privilege and white
superiority which suggest I truly screwed the pooch in my recent decisions to
seek better working conditions/leave my academic positions, and American
exceptionalism, Rugged Individualism. Bootstrapping and American Dreaming
suggest the weight to make it work, to remain successful, was on my shoulders
and mine alone. I made my decisions to relocate, criticize, and quit bad jobs
to look for better jobs. My new economic status reflects a self-made
individual.

Further, regardless of my possible current poverty (luckily
I have a working spouse, but she’s in K12 education too, so you can image how
tight our budget is for our family of four), strings of critical race theory,
probably misapplied, suggest that as a white, straight, male, I was born rich
and privileged. Putnam does, at least, offer a decent job of revealing that
white privilege only gets poor whites so far. As well, he reveals that white
superiority could be rebranded accurately as class superiority, since the
opportunity gap within races has widened too and middle and upper-middle class
people of color are pulling ahead as their poorer peers fall further behind,
just as is the case among and within white populations.

I suppose my reach exceeded
my grasp – my grasp of what it took to stay in the middle class once I got
there; my understanding of upper-middle class culture and the upper-middle class
culture of academia; my (mis)understanding that a doctorate in education and an
established record of scholarship and publication granted me enough authority
and security to speak out against K12- and higher education ills. Well-educated
scholars and researchers might look at me and see the “White Supreme,” and
notions of individualism suggest that I must have messed up handily to feel
like a pariah or reject or object of erasure and be straight, white, and male.

Putnam helps me see – could help
any willing reader see—that white supremacy seeks to keep many more of us under
thumb than critical race theory or theories on gender and sex inequalities
might allow. White supremacy is not the domain of whites; it is the domain of
the small, exclusive white ruling class – and of the people of color in those upper
classes too.

American Supremacy Systems vs. Upward Mobility?

To affect social change,
people of color and those advocating for specific marginalized groups rather than for wholesale socioeconomic reform will need to decide if that is a reality they can accept; if
acknowledging their own socioeconomic privilege and the growing class gaps
positively changes their perspectives and benefits. Ideally, a Putnam-informed
perspective would help whites and people of color work together to the mutual
benefit of all regarding upward mobility and a reconsidering of “Supremacy.”

When the stakes are so high that one risks
returning to poverty and hardship upon critiquing the systems of socioeconomic Supremacy
and being erased as a recognized poor
person due to limiting definitions, and so much weight is on the individual’s
shoulders in terms of culpability within America’s mobility apparatus, can
those on the precipice of privilege or comfortably within it find ways to
answer the call of addressing inequities without being crushed by the machine
that gave them the silver spoon-, or perhaps just the sliver-, of-a-chance to
do well?

Wednesday, August 5, 2015

The July 31, 2015, broadcast of This American Life covers issues of schooling and segregation by race and poverty. The topic connects well with my discussion of Our Kids, so I want to share the link to the broadcast, "The Problem We All Live With." Find it * here.*Nikole Hannah-Jones talks with Ira Glass about busing, integration, why segregation stopped, and why it might work again. While there are many problematic aspects to the conversation -- a focus on improving schools rather than communities, favoring of white/black notions of diversity at the expense of attention to other enthicities, relying on test scores as a metric, to mention a few -- I still recommend it, especially if paired with a reading of Putnam's Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. (Or braided with that book and Coates' latest Between the World and Me). As well, *here's* some commentary on the broadcast from VOX.

Monday, August 3, 2015

Below I offer the third in a series of posts reflecting on my reading of Robert Putnam's 2015 Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. In this and coming posts, I examine Our Kids in digestible chunks, offer critique, and attempt to expound upon connections I see to education and schooling, education reform, and my own experiences.I see this book as central to understanding contemporary exigencies regarding education policy and essential to building and actualizing an egalitarian social justice agenda.

I wonder if America is in segregation denial. So few seem to
realize the civil rights battles from the 1950s and 60s did help to desegregate
the American South, but many U.S. communities and social institutions across
the nation were then and remain now segregated by color or ethnicity. Churches
are prime examples. Housing communities too. In the North and elsewhere,
communities remain deeply segregated, even more so than in the South, but this
fact is one of many regarding sociocultural dividing lines to which Americans
seem oblivious or simply don’t want to believe.

After all, slavery and racism
were only constructs of the confederate states, and reconstruction took care of
all that, right? Of course not, but when it comes to addressing the realities
of seclusion and exclusion, it seems to me Americans either turn the blind eye
or don the rose-colored glasses.

In the latter pages of the first chapter in Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard
University Robert Putnam reveals more disturbing trends regarding growing
opportunity and social mobility gaps. Not only are more affluent families
pulling further away from less-fortunate peers in terms of accumulated wealth,
but “the ballooning economic gap has been accompanied by growing de facto
segregation of Americans along class lines” (37).

Putnam says contemporary exigencies differs from past
decades in which social mobility was more equally distributed in that fewer
people are exposed to people beyond their own “socioeconomic niche” (37.)
Simply put, the well-off are disappearing the rest of us, and it may be that
this disappearing continues to happen at whatever other marked class delineations
exist. Class segregation is “pervasive,” says Putnam, and housing communities
offer evidence to that affect: “More and more families live either in uniformly
affluent neighborhoods or in uniformly poor neighborhoods” (38).

Putnam labels this phenomenon “geographic polarization,”
though I prefer his other descriptor, “incipient class apartheid” (39).

Lest one thinks Putnam ignores racial and ethnic segregation
while favoring income data, note he offers evidence that “race-based
segregation has been slowly declining” while “class-based segregation has been
increasing” (38).

What are ramifications of the “incipient class apartheid” linked
with my worries about Americans’ foggy vision? If the rich no longer live among
the rest of us, and we live only among those in our own income and housing
brackets, how do we develop and sustain authentic empathy for those who are
less fortunate than ourselves? If the benefits of living with the like-incomed
are such that living in a mixed-bracket community actually seem to hurt a well-off
family’s networking and ability to sustain their own lifestyle or support their
progeny to the best of their ability, why would anyone seek to economically
diversify communities?

Similar anxieties permeate Putnam’s thinking too: He worries,
for example, that kids from different economic strata are not considered “our
kids” anymore, that there is no longer a sense among elders that everyone in a
community wants to see all young people, regardless of their economic station,
do well and grow their economic progress.

Stratification seems
to perpetuate not even a “You do you; I’ll do me” attitude and necessity, but a
“We’ll do us. No one else exists” mentality among the economically empowered
which should concern even the most hardcore American capitalist. Not only is “trickle-down”
not working; families at the top may be so cut off from realities beyond their
own there isn’t even thought given to trickling. Don’t believe me? Try
discussing poverty and housing with your peer groups. Note instances of denial
and discomfort. Time the conversation to see how long it takes someone to
mention that by global standards, Americans in poverty are the envy of the
world. For those in poverty, the notion of bootstrapping may seem like a
perverse like more than even a fading dream.

Affluent kids are more likely to attend good schools and
have more choices regarding education; are more likely placed into advanced,
college-readying classes; are more likely to attend top-tier universities; are more
likely to have two parents who are both well-off; and more likely to benefit
from tapping into a vast network of influential and powerful peers and parental
peers than are their less-wealthy counterparts.

In both absolute mobility (which Putnam describes as a situation in which "a rising tide lifts all boats")and relative mobility ("dinghies doing even better than yachts," or the ability of less-privileged folks to surpass the more-privileged and networked) , "American youth now have the worst of both worlds -- low absolute mobility and low relative mobility" (42). Even if a non-affluent somehow gets a dinghy they may find themselves rowing in a situation like this fellow's.

I worry, since affluent
people may see less of those not like themselves regarding these segregations,
they may even be less likely to even acknowledge “counterparts” exist. As a first-generation college student who grew
up with family unrest, an economic base teetering at best, and many mitigating
stresses when it came to doing well and fully participating in school, I worry
especially about the friendship network and social resources gaps between the
affluent and the poor. Had it not been for the support mentors and caring
individuals outside my own socioeconomic strata, I am sure I would not have
survived as well as I did as a conscientious but resource-limited student. I
had people – teachers, friends, and parents of friends -- believing in my
abilities to overcome. But Putnam suggests that sort of cross-class
humanitarianism is at risk. Before delving into chapters on families,
parenting, schooling, community, and, finally, suggestions, Putnam sums his
book’s findings and concerns:

Ultimately, growing class segregation across neighborhoods,
school, marriages (and probably also civic associations, workplaces, and
friendship circles) means that rich Americans and poor Americans are living,
learning, and raising children in increasingly separate and unequal worlds,
removing the stepping-stones to upward mobility – college-going classmates or
cousins or middle-class neighbors, who might take a working-class kid from the neighborhood
under their wing. Moreover, class segregation means that members of the upper
middle class are less likely to have firsthand knowledge of the lives of poor
kids and thus are unable even to recognize the growing opportunity gap (41).

When it comes to acknowledging socioeconomic inequality,
perhaps rose-colored glasses keep their tint because they disappear all but
those in the same economic situation as the wearers. For the affluent, this possibility
can screen people from the needs and well-being of the less-fortunate. For the
less-fortunate, it reveals the mockery and manipulation of Hope.

Edustank was the ed reform-critical blog of James Bucky Carter, Ph.D. A former middle school and high school ELA teacher, Carter taught ELA methods classes at the University of Virginia (where he earned his doctorate in English Education), the University of Southern Mississippi, the University of Texas at El Paso, and Washington State University. He worked alongside Ed Reform-Critical Boxer to share news about what stinks in education and was eager to give voice to those who may feel voiceless.

Opinions voiced herein represent the thoughts of Carter at the time they were written and may or may not represent his current thinking. As such, enjoy this site as an archive and mine its various links and commentary in ways useful and benevolent.